


Countdown

by TheSciFiBlob



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fluff, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Non-Linear Narrative, Seeing the future, VERY brief smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:49:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29712597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSciFiBlob/pseuds/TheSciFiBlob
Summary: “Welcome to the Delphi establishment. How can we help you?”The door clicks shut behind him. No backing out now. That must be his heartbeat pounding hard against his epiglottis.Atsumu finds his voice, shaky but present. “I - I wish to see my future.”A sakuatsu love story, told backwards.
Relationships: Miya Atsumu/Sakusa Kiyoomi
Comments: 3
Kudos: 64
Collections: SakuAtsu Fluff Week 2021





	Countdown

**Author's Note:**

> Oof. Not sure if I'm fully satisfied with this fic, but I've also spent far too long mulling over it. Sending this out into the world while hiding behind my hands...
> 
> Would love any feedback folks have about structure, or characterization & pacing! 
> 
> There's two brief sex scenes in here. If you want to skip them, the first one starts with "He's here, he's here, he's here" and ends with "crystallizes." The second one starts with " "Miya," a voice breathes " and ends with "thick tangle of bedsheets."
> 
> A (very late) submission for Sakuatsu Fluff Week day 10

Atsumu looks uncharacteristically flustered as he stumbles through the door, his face red and breathing fast. He does his best to ignore the way his stupid heart is trying to leap into his throat. _It’s probably stuck up there_ , Atsumu notes wryly, lodged somewhere between his trachea and larynx where his throat is tight. A gust of cold air hits his face at the threshold. 

_If Samu saw ya like this_ \- his eyes close briefly against the draft - _he’d never let ya live it down._

“Welcome to the Delphi establishment. How can we help you?”

The door clicks shut behind him. _No backing out now._ That must be his heartbeat pounding hard against his epiglottis.

Atsumu finds his voice, shaky but present. “I - I wish to see my future.”

A pair of dark blue eyes meet his from across the welcome desk. The receptionist stands - her deep black hair, where it isn’t tucked behind her glasses, swishes a little when she walks. She stands tall and her eyes carry a subtle but authoritative glint. On any other day Atsumu would probably have opened his mouth, flirted just a little, said something foolish and flashy just for show. On this particular day, he finds that his loud mouth is dampened slightly by the existential dread of barreling toward a self-imposed death. 

_Will ya shut up_ , he tells his own brain. 

The receptionist’s name tag reads _Shimizu Kiyoko._ Her lips are curled just barely upward, as if she can hear the entirety of Atsumu’s rapid inner monologue.

“Follow me,” she calls over her shoulder, and Atsumu has no choice but to fast-walk forward to catch her retreating figure down a narrow hallway. Her heels click loudly against the linoleum floors, each quick beat counting the seconds left of Atsumu’s existence. 

_Stop it_ , he snaps at himself.

Shimizu gestures to a closed door on the left. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Atsumu swallows his own heart and reaches for the doorknob.

* * *

If you ask him to recount the moments that led him here, retrace each step backwards out the sleek Delphi skyscraper to the shinkansen doors sliding open at the Tokyo station to the doormat outside his Osaka apartment, Atsumu might stop the clock on that pivotal moment one week ago from today. Sunday, 4:53pm. Osamu and Suna stumble through the restaurant door, matching gold rings glinting on their fingers, lost in each other’s eyes - just completely gone. Or two weeks before that. Tuesday, 6:42pm. Atsumu loads the last box of his belongings onto the moving van, casting a backwards glance at the apartment he’d shared with his twin for half a decade. A year ago. Friday, 7:12pm. _When will you bring someone home?_ okaa-san asks him with a laugh. Two years ago. Saturday, 11:48pm. Osamu and Suna meet for the first time, eyes drawn to one another from across the bar. Six years ago. Wednesday, 6:47am. Over breakfast cereal, like it’s the most mundane thought in the world, Osamu tells him, _I’m quitting volleyball after high school._

The hands on the analog clock in his new apartment move too fast, always running just a little ahead. Atsumu is proud of his twin, harsh jabs and teasing punches hiding his grudging admiration for the many ways Osamu has grown and remade himself. (Not that he’ll ever say that to his brother’s face). But in between the early morning practices and international flights of a professional volleyball career, something rises in Atsumu: an absence, a red countdown clock, a strange dysphoric sense that the vision of the future he’s chasing, as he flies from stadium to stadium to make set after set, is no longer tangible to him. 

He can’t stand the sympathetic looks on his family’s faces when he tells them about it, their eyes swimming with assumptions. So a week ago he did some google searches and landed on the website for the Delphi establishment. 

_Curious about your future?_ the website asked him. _Looking for an answer only you can find?_

A week later, armed with a shinkansen ticket and a morning appointment at the most secretive establishment in Tokyo, Atsumu speeds away from Osaka when the sun begins to rise. He watches the trees and buildings melt into a blur out the window of the train. His family and his teammates are still in bed, oblivious, unaware. 

* * *

He opens the door to a clean desk and a towering black chair tucked behind it. The chair is turned away from him, backrest so tall it nearly obscures the lone figure facing the electronic screen covering the far wall. Only a few strands of his black curls peek out above the top of the chair.

Atsumu lets the door fall shut behind him. He stumbles toward the desk.

The click of a button sounds; like magic, the screen comes alive, whizzing through photographs and profiles until it lands on a picture of him, a week ago, eating ramen at a dimly lit hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Osaka. It was a selfie he’d taken; you could see the blur of a thumb in the lower left corner, the roar of lights and crowds behind him. 

“Miya Atsumu. Twenty-three. Professional volleyball player.” The voice is low, stern, devoid of feeling. It cuts the air sharper than a knife. 

Atsumu swallows. “Y-yes,” he manages. 

“Why are you here, Miya Atsumu?”

Atsumu takes a shallow breath. “‘M here to see my future,” he mumbles. 

“No.”

Atsumu blinks. “No?” he asks. A cold chill flashes down his spine. 

“No,” the voice says again. And then the chair swivels around, and Atsumu’s heart leaps from his throat into the stratosphere. 

In the chair sits the most strikingly handsome person he’s ever seen, dark ringlets framing the contours of a sharp face, two bright black eyes sizing him up over a white surgical mask. He wears a white coat fitted nicely to the contours of his shoulders, and his hands, steepled at his face with his elbows resting on the table, are gloved in clean black nitrile. For the briefest moment, the rush of time and wind and spinning world come to a standstill. He’s staring at Atsumu with an unsettling, penetrative gaze. 

“Do you know how the datastream works?”

Ah, yes. The reason Atsumu is here. The room’s sharp lines reappear around him as his lucidity returns, settling back into the normal flow of time. 

_Pull yerself together_ , he commands sharply. If Samu were here, he’d deal some shitty jab about Atsumu losing his cool at the most inopportune moments. 

“Ya connect with a Delphi headset,” he mumbles, feeling grateful now for the late nights he’d spent scouring the website. The words he’s memorized begin tumbling forth. “‘M not too sure ‘bout the scientific aspects of it … somethin’ about connection to the hippocampus or somethin’ like that. But it should show me glimpses of the future.” He looks up; his hands tap in anxious anticipation against each other. He hopes it’s not perceptible. “Glimpses of _my_ future.”

The man across from him gives a tight nod. His eyes flicker to Atsumu’s nervous fingers, then back up. “You’re right about the basic premise. What you need to know” - and here he slides a sheet of paper onto the desk. (If Atsumu’s heart races faster it’s purely his nerves, and _not_ because their hands are only a few inches apart) - “is that the quality of the visions are not guaranteed. Some users report hearing voices, experiencing colors or brief impressions. A few will experience scenes. The visions are never in chronological order, and there’s no guarantee you will remember them.” He taps a finger on the page in front of him. “I'll ask you again, Miya Atsumu. Why are you here?”

Atsumu has a tendency to let his loud mouth run when he's nervous. 

“I wanna know if I’ll ever fall in love again,” he blurts out to the stranger in front of him.

The stranger, for the briefest of seconds, drops his stern composure. His eyes widen just slightly, the muscles at the top of his jaw re-angling as though his lips have parted behind the mask. Atsumu would have missed it, had his career not been built on his ability to read and decipher and understand across a net. 

“Surprised?” Atsumu, equally mortified and mesmerized, does his best to hide both. He makes an attempt at his characteristic service ace smirk, the one that angers every libero he’s wielded it against. It must fall short, because the man across from him stares back impassively, his face resettling into the indecipherable stone wall that both unnerves and aggravates Atsumu.

“Not many people are willing to be honest here.”

“Well, ya asked, didn’t ya?” Swallowing, Atsumu leans back against the wall.

“You’re nervous.” It’s not a question, just a toneless statement, and it awakens a spark of heat somewhere inside Atsumu. He finds his hands clenching into fists by his side, his heart beginning to race. _It’s irritation_ , Atsumu identifies, and doesn’t let himself consider the alternative. 

“Well, obviously.” Atsumu puts on his best unimpressed airs, shifting his weight onto his left leg and tapping the heel of his right impatiently. “Are we gonna get this started, sometime today?”

The corners of the man’s eyes crinkle slightly. He drops a ballpoint pen onto the page of fine-print font. “Sign here,” he says, hiding any laughter behind a mask. Atsumu grabs the pen and clicks it, not willing to concede defeat, trying not to feel as though he’s signing his life away.

* * *

“You’re not very patient, are you?” the man asks him as his hands reach behind Atsumu’s head to tighten the cold steel helmet strapped around his head. 

“What gives ya that impression?” Atsumu shoots back, his fingernails tapping an increasingly rapid rhythm against the plastic armrest of his chair.

The man’s face shifts again, that same muscle in his jaw jumping upward and giving the impression of a hidden smile behind the mask. “Just a hunch, Miya-san.” He withdraws his hand, and Atsumu tries to tamper down the warring impatience and fear searing through his chest. He hears a soft click from somewhere behind him, and then the cold material of the helmet tightens around his head.

“It’s starting,” the man says. “You’ll slip into the visions in about a minute or so, and from there you have a half hour in the datastream. The beginning works a little like anesthesia; you may have some alterations in your perception of the space around you.” He walks back into Atsumu’s line of vision, and Atsumu swears his eyes have a teasing glint. “Any last words, Miya Atsumu?”

“What’s yer name?” Atsumu asks with an obnoxious wink, trying to distract himself from the disorienting pressure around his head. He’s not sure if it’s the helmet, or if all his earlier adrenaline-induced running has finally caught up to him, but Atsumu can swear the world seems to move just a little bit slower, the rise and fall of the man’s chest drawing themselves out into longer movements.

“Sakusa,” the man says. “Sakusa Kiyo--kiyo--yo--oo.” It’s the strangest sight. In front of Atsumu’s eyes, the man’s (Sakusa’s) mask shifts up, back down, back up, back down, and his voice gets stuck on that last syllable of his name, the sound drawing out and repeating over and over, like a broken cassette tape. Atsumu wonders at the last missing syllable, the sound that just might be the puzzle piece he didn’t know he was missing, until the voice disappears and Atsumu sinks into a world of dark.

  
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  


“Omi,” Atsumu whispers, and his voice feels different in his throat this time, gravely and quieter than he’s used to. But it’s loud enough to earn a gentle hand squeeze from the figure sitting beside him on the grassy hill, watching the shine of city lights against the night.

“Atsumu,” the figure whispers back, voice equally quiet and no less saturated with love. Atsumu turns his head, taking in the silver-grey hair cascading in ringlets, the dark eyes, the two moles above a right eyebrow, dotted amidst a web of wrinkles and smile lines. A soft warmth rises in his chest, a happiness stirring slowly within him. A muscle jumps near the man’s temple as he smiles, and Atsumu can’t help but feel that this person is achingly familiar, that he should be able to name him from somewhere in a different place and time… 

Instead, Atsumu runs his thumb against a wrinkled hand. “I wouldn’t trade this for the world," he whispers.

The person beside him - Omi - makes a soft, assenting noise from the back of his throat. “Are you satisfied with seven decades, Miya?”

Atsumu turns his gaze skyward. “No,” he says decisively. “But I’ll find ya again, Omi.” The words resonate deep and true, surrounding the two of them as the sky enlarges, as the dark swallows away the image of stars and city lights.

* * *

Atsumu comes to in the thin sheets of a hospital bed, a monitor strapped to his chest. His eyes blink open to the sight of a teary-eyed figure, his grey curls streaked with lingering strands of black. The figure rushes closer, and Atsumu feels two cold hands closing around his own.

“Atsumu?” the man whispers. “Do you know who I am?”

He doesn’t, and the absence makes him ache, makes him feel like the world is resting on a name that balances on the tip of his tongue, but before he can articulate this thought his lips have moved of their own accord. “Yeah,” he rasps, and this answer hangs true in the air of the moment Atsumu has found himself in. “Hi, Omi.”

The figure, Omi, breathes a low, relieved sigh. “You scared me,” he whispers back, tracing patterns into the skin on the back of his hand.

Atsumu manages a soft smile. “We’ve been here before,” he says - and just like the syllable _Omi_ fell effortlessly from his lips, so too does this statement, pulling on some history Atsumu has not yet lived. “It’s _my_ turn to comfort ya this time.”

Omi leans into the bed’s wrinkled sheets and draws closer. “I’m not ready yet,” he admits, his voice low. 

“Good,” Atsumu finds himself whispering. “Neither am I, Omi.” He traces the cold metal of a ring on Omi’s finger, and watches as the dark swallows the lines and contours of the hospital room, until all that remains is the firm pressure of a cold but steady hand.

* * *

The image of the hand emerges first, followed by the strong arm and warm body curled around Atsumu, who finds himself sprawled out on a couch with a TV screen playing a volleyball game and two bowls of half-eaten dinner on a low table an arm’s distance away. The light of the TV screen flickers across a man sprawled comfortably on the couch, his black curls splayed across a cushion, his limbs tangled with Atsumu’s. A comfortable distance away, a tabby cat sits quietly, licking at its paws. 

“Omi,” Atsumu finds himself whining, in a teasingly petulant voice. “Yer missin’ half the game!”

Omi, whose other hand is holding a phone up to his face, tilts the phone screen so Atsumu can see. “Akari texted,” he says simply, and that’s enough in the way of an explanation for Atsumu to crowd over to the screen, volleyball game momentarily forgotten.

“Akari?” he asks, and sees the photo of a small square room with a bunked bed and off-white walls, two large luggages resting in the middle of the floor. _Roommate’s coming in an hour_ , the text reads. _Just starting to unpack_.

“They grow up so fast,” Atsumu complains melodramatically, pretending to wipe away a fake tear to mask the real pangs of love and joy and loss - the disorienting sense that all of this is happening just a little too soon, the world moving just a little too fast for his liking.

Omi snorts, but his arm tightens around Atsumu’s body, as though he sees right through his playful front. “She’s no more than a train ride away,” he murmurs into Atsumu’s ear, and Atsumu curls deeper into his body, the warmth lingering even as darkness takes the TV screen and the table and the couch. He hears the rest of the words that Omi leaves unspoken: _And I’m right here, always._

* * *

_He’s here, he’s here_ , _he’s here,_ he’s here -- the warmth of his body all-enveloping, the breaths that graze his ear searing, his roaming hands burning brands across Atsumu’s chest and his sides. “Omi,” he cries out, louder than he means to; he hears the reactionary curse from a pair of lips hovering too close, feels in a shock of pleasure Omi’s response in the sudden shift of his hips.

“Omi,” he whispers into the heat of the air around them, and he doesn’t stop saying it, over and over, not as their bodies slip into a rhythm at once too grueling and not enough, not as Atsumu arcs his back and cants his hips in a relentless game of chase, not as Omi responds with a curse and a rapid series of thrusts, not until the heat peaks and the air fills with both their names and time itself - caught up in the agony of their desire - crystallizes.

* * *

The world blacks out for an indeterminable length of time - _a day, a month, a decade?_ \- and when it finally reappears it’s in the form of a little girl with brown pigtails tugging him along fiercely by the hand. 

“Move faster, otou-chan!” she commands him, her sneakered feet tapping impatiently against the pavement. “It’s the first day of school, we can’t be late!” She shifts the straps of her backpack against her shoulders, looking determined and important and proud, and gives Atsumu a disgruntled huff. “Who’s the adult around here, huh?”

Atsumu’s sides split open in laughter. “Akari, we’re forty minutes early,” he chuckles, flipping her left pigtail lovingly. They’re tied up with matching blue ribbons, the shorter strands hovering around the ties in a soft halo of frizzy ringlets. _She’s beautiful_ , Atsumu thinks - exactly the sort of girl he would have been starstruck and thoroughly intimidated by on the elementary school playground. “You woke us all up at 5a.m. in the morning today so we could start getting ready.”

Akari stomps her right foot imperiously, and the sneaker lights up and begins to sing. Atsumu almost doubles over in laughter a second time, but manages to hold it in with difficulty. Akari had chosen out the sneakers a few weeks ago, spotting them from halfway across the department store, and she insisted on being taken with the utmost seriousness whenever she wore them.

“It’s not _my_ fault you and otou-chan stayed up so late making all that ruckus in your room,” she shoots back. “Maybe if you two stopped doing jumping jacks on your bed in the middle of the night you’d wake up at an appropriate time to take me to school.”

Akari seems thoroughly puzzled by the way Atsumu’s face turns a brilliant shade of red, and his response falls into a garbled series of sputters. But she doesn’t complain about the way he suddenly seems very interested in making it quickly to school, his strides matching the short, energetic skips of her own light-up sneakers.

* * *

The lights of her shoes, blue and green and joyous, morph into the light blue of a nondescript clinic wall. Atsumu finds himself seated on the examination bed, tracing the patterns on the wall with his eyes and feeling strangely lighter than he’d ever expected for himself in a moment like this.

The door sweeps open, and a tall figure with piercing eyes and a shock of black ringlets stares at him across the room.

“Atsumu,” his familiar voice says, managing to sound warm despite the strain. He walks forward quickly, and then his arms are thrown around Atsumu’s shoulders and a pair of cold hands rub circles into his lower back. Besides the steady movement of his hands, he keeps his body still, allowing Atsumu to drape himself around his body and bury his face into the heat of his shoulder.

“It’s over,” Atsumu murmurs in way of an explanation. “They said they’re not sure if I can go back to playing …” his words come out slowly, calmly, none of the halting breaths and stumbling phrases he’d expected. His mind is somewhere else, wondering at its own incongruent calm in a moment that ought to be - by all his own metrics - devastating.

I know, Atsumu,” Omi whispers low into his ear. “I know.”

Atsumu swallows. “It’s strange, isn’t it? I’ve always been terrified of something like this happening. But now that we’re here,” he looks up, meets Omi’s two dark eyes, “It doesn’t feel so impossible, Omi-omi. I wonder if it’s because of ya?”

Omi tightens his arm around him, and Atsumu squeezes his eyes shut against his shoulder once again. He lets himself drift away in recollections. He and Osamu joined the same volleyball training camps as children; those courts were where he met Aran and Kita and fell in love for the first time, and he never thought he could imagine it all coming to an end right here, this way. He’s still not fully sure he can imagine the prospect of days and months and decades without it, stretching forward into a future that has no shape yet. As his mind wanders, Atsumu is struck with the strangest sensation of something he’s forgetting: some reason why his mind knows not to worry, why time is on his side, why his body is still yearning forward with the certainty of safety beyond. He’s not sure he can put a finger on it. Right now, maybe it’s okay to simply hold tight to the broad shoulders beside him, lingering in the paradoxical quiet of a world that keeps on spinning. He closes his eyes, easing into the welcoming dark.

* * *

The silence grows, stretches, lengthens fast and dizzyingly until Atsumu finds himself planted feet-first on the brilliant blue flooring that surrounds a volleyball court, overhead lights bright and sparkling. He’s standing on the edge of a large gymnasium. In his periphery he can sense his teammates tensed in place around the court. (Like a sixth sense, he can feel Omi out there in the ocean of bleachers, watching him). Everyone is silent, breaths held in. Time stops. Atsumu’s fist floats in the air, his head downturned, expression grim. Around the gymnasium walls, the ghost of a whistle echoes.

Atsumu takes four steps forward. His feet leave the ground, his arm swings up behind him, his palm meets the arc of an airborne ball. The ball flies toward the net, shaky in its trajectory, spinless and all the more dangerous. He watches the other team’s libero dive as the ball dovetails toward the floor. He’s a second too late. A beat of silence follows the ball’s thud onto the court, and then all hell breaks loose. His name echoes a million different ways through the air. In his periphery Atsumu can see his teammates rushing toward him, their hands latching onto his arms and shoulders and the fabric of his uniform, their shouts deafening. He sees the crowd going wild, people rising from their seats in waves. But all he has time to register is the shock of a pair of unmistakable dark eyes in the third row of bleachers across the gym. The eyes stare back at him, crinkling at their edges in subtle laughter, and Atsumu finds that he has never felt more alive.

* * *

“Miya,” a voice breathes into his ear, and suddenly Atsumu finds himself pushed against the couch cushions in a small, warm apartment, alive in a very different way. “Is this okay?”

Atsumu must have said something right, because he can feel the sharpness of the air against his bare torso - and then the calloused warmth of two hands leaving searing touches against his skin, tracing patterns that his brain is in no state to decode. “Yes,” somebody whispers into the air, and he thinks it’s his partner until Atsumu hears him respond with a low groan and a trace of lips along the side of his throat.

“Omi” - and this time he registers his own voice with a jolt of shock, taking in the rasping and guttural quality of it. This doesn’t stop him - “Omi, I want” - and he’s arcing his hips upward in a silent question that his words can’t finish. Omi breathes another moan into his neck, before his hand reaches between them to pull away at the thin pieces of fabric that separate them. Their bodies move impatiently, recklessly - Atsumu hasn’t felt this clumsy, this satisfied in years - and he loses himself in rough hands and hot breaths and the thick tangle of bedsheets.

* * *

The world goes black again, after their bodies are spent and Atsumu’s muscles have sunk into a quickly fading bed. This time Atsumu can hear snippets of a world hovering just outside his range of vision.

“Not there!” his own voice cries out with a laugh, accompanied by the swelling sound of an approaching car - and then the sound vanishes with the sensation of wheels zipping past. 

Silence. A light graze of lips to his temple, his forehead, the tip of his nose … 

Bells jingle as a door opens, and the muffled chatter of a crowded restaurant greets his ears. Atsumu feels a light breeze on his face; he must be walking forward, and his hand is clasped around something warm, tugging it forward alongside him. “Oi, Samu!” he calls into the dark. “Table for two!”

A strong gust of wind hits his face, accompanied by a light and refreshing mist. Somewhere in front of him, the roaring sound of water and the quieter, playful splashing of children echo just out of range. _A waterfall?_ A pair of warm arms wrap around his middle. “Beautiful,” a voice whispers into his ears.

The arms disappear, and instead his own hands raise upward, as if preparing to set, and the light pressure of a volleyball pushes into them. Atsumu would know that feeling anywhere. On instinct, he shifts his fingers and pushes up, tracing the imagined trajectory of the ball through dark space to a location five feet away where he hears the footsteps of a running approach. He hears the echo of a solid hit, and then a satisfied grunt from a voice - a sound he’d recognize anywhere.

Fingertips trace over his eyelids, his ears, his lips - he swipes at one with his tongue before they withdraw, rapid and playful, into the dark. “Come back,” he laughs, craning his head to call them back.

He hears the soft pad of footsteps, feels the ghost of a bandana slipping off his face. “Happy birthday, Atsumu,” a voice whispers low in his ears. “Open your eyes.”

Atsumu’s eyes open to the vision of a small cafe, glowing under the afternoon sunlight slanting through the curtains. Sitting across from him at a table for two, fork hovering over a half-eaten slice of cake, Omi is smiling softly at him. His curls, bathed in light, glint a coppery red.

“You have frosting on your face,” he says, and reaches out thumb to swipe lightly at Atsumu’s bottom lip.

A warmth blossoms in Atsumu’s chest. “It’s the new look, Omi.”

Omi rolls his eyes to hide the upward turn of his lips. “I’m dating a weirdo.”

“That’s not what ya were sayin’ last night, Omi,'' Atsumu quips, and is satisfied by the dark blush that spreads across Omi’s cheeks. And then - “Omi, d’ya remember what first convinced ya to go on a date with me?”

“Yes.” Omi shifts in his seat and attempts to regain his unfazed demeanor. “You received a volleyball with your face.”

Atsumu cringes, but his lips turn upward. “Rude, Omi!” he laughs. 

It’s Omi’s turn to roll his eyes in faux exasperation, and Atsumu tracks the movement attentively. “Ya know, we almost missed out on all this,” he says, gesturing around them to the pale blue curtains and white tables of the cafe. “We would have” - here he wags an accusatory finger at Omi - “if ya had kept overthinkin’ everything.”

Omi looks about ready to retort with another jab, but stops midway, and his face goes through a series of strange expressions. He glances down at the slice of cake, suddenly quiet. “Sometimes,” he admits, “I still have trouble believing any of this is real.”

His upward glance at Atsumu looks tense, as though he’s expecting some sort of disappointment. Instead, Atsumu swallows and takes a rare pause to consider his next words. “Is there somethin’ in particular that’s hard to believe, Omi?”

“I…” Omi pauses too. “I think I forget, sometimes, that this is more than just a collection of memories. Like, yesterday we went out to dinner, and the night before we did our laundry together. And it’s easy to stay in the moment forever, but sometimes when you’re not there, and I’m thinking about where we’ll be a month from now, a year from now…”

When Atsumu nods, Omi looks surprised. “S’hard to not know what’s in store. I hear ya, Omi.” He tilts his head with a mischievous smirk. “Would’ve been much easier if I’d seen anythin’ in the datastream, huh? Always said ya would regret tamperin’ with my session.”

Omi snorts and reaches across the table to tap the side of Atsumu’s head. “I didn’t tamper with anything. Not my fault you’re too lame for the datastream to show you anything.”

“Hey!” As Atsumu reaches across the table, laughing, the curtains and the table and the slanting light are eclipsed by the dark.

* * *

Atsumu registers the ice pack first, pressed harshly to his throbbing nose. Then he registers the pain - dull throbs across his face that has him groaning and leaning back into the pillows behind his head. 

He hears a door opening and closing. “You’re an idiot,” a familiar voice says, before his masked face and dark curls emerge out of the dark. 

Is it strange to know without context when and where he is? To accept the ice pack, the pillows, the figure beside him as they materialize from the dark? Atsumu finds that he doesn’t much care what the dark obscures, so long as he can see the one person who matters in this moment.

“Omi,” he calls, voice sounding nasally and strange. “Ya came through.”

Omi rolls his eyes and feigns nonchalance. “I had to make sure you didn’t die, Miya. I’m too young to be sued for negligence.”

Atsumu laughs. “Maybe ya should have thought of that before ya spiked the ball into my face.”

“Maybe you should receive with something other than your face.”

“Can’t help it, can I? Wanted to keep ya in my line of vision.” Atsumu gives a suggestive wink, which sends an immediate flash of pain through his nose. He winces. Something shifts in Omi’s eyes, and he leans closer in concern. “You okay?”

An odd warmth blossoms in Atsumu’s chest. “Yeah,” he says, settling deeper into the pillows. “Let’s not make a habit out of this, okay?”

Sakusa’s forehead wrinkles. “Has this happened before?”

Atsumu laughs, a strange glint in his eyes. “Just a feelin’, Omi.” His fingers trace an unconscious circle around his ring finger. “Just a feelin’.”

* * *

Omi’s face disappears in a dizzying flash of light. Before Atsumu has time for shock he finds himself standing underneath the midday sun, feet sinking into hot sand. There’s a net in his periphery; he’s staring through it to the spot where, a second prior, another pair of feet had just stood.

He hears the crack of a palm slamming into a volleyball.

“Miya!” someone shouts to his left. “Watch out!”

In the split second before impact, Atsumu is struck by the sense that he’s missing something obvious and important.

A sharp pressure hits him in the nose, and the world blacks out.

* * *

Atsumu jerks upright with a gasp. He takes in the cold chair under his legs, the fluorescent lights, the weight on his head. _What on earth?_ He can’t remember where he is or why he’s here, and he can feel his heart pounding, his breath beginning to speed up. 

A gloved hand extends in front of his face. “Miya-san,” a voice says. It’s too familiar to be unrecognizable, but the low tone sets Atsumu’s body at ease. His muscles untense and he reaches out his own hand toward the black nitrile. “Welcome b--”

* * *

Atsumu jerks upright with a gasp. He takes in the cold chair under his legs, the fluorescent lights, the weight on his head. _What on earth?_ He feels the strangest sense of deja vu. 

A hand extends in front of his face. “Miya-san,” a voice says. Once again it’s so achingly familiar. _Why can’t he …_ “Welcome back.”

Atsumu’s hands meet the nitrile material, which feels unexpectedly warm. Slowly, he eases himself upright. An arm snakes around his head, and a second later the weight slips off him. A large metal helmet clunks onto the table next to him.

A pair of dark eyes and black ringlets enter his field of vision. The eyes are squinted just slightly, as if trying to size Atsumu up. “Can you tell me what your name is?”

Atsumu blinks a few times, groggily. “Miya? Miya Atsumu.”

“What day is it?”

“Um, March? March 20th.”

The man nods, satisfied. He turns around to begin taking the helmet apart. “Did you…” he begins, his back turned. His voice sounds even, but his shoulders raise ever so slightly toward his ears. _Interesting._ “Did you see anything?”

Huh. Atsumu clears his throat, clenches and unclenches his hands a few times in front of him. He tries to rack his brain for any recollection. “No … “ he begins slowly. “No, I - I don’t think so.” He swallows again, a wave of disappointment sweeping through him. 

The man sets the disassembled helmet down. “It’s not uncommon for people to forget what they’ve seen in the datastream, or to only remember bits and pieces.”

“Mm.” Atsumu shifts in his seat. “Still … I was hopin’ to walk away from all this with somethin’ helpful.” He gestures vaguely around at the room, then looks up when the man approaches him again.

“Do you remember my name?”

“Sakusa,” Atsumus says, and the name makes him shudder inexplicably, as though there’s something important he’s missing. “Sakusa Ki...kiyo… I think I must have slipped off before ya finished.”

“It’s Sakusa Kiyoomi.”

“Kiyoomi,” Atsumu repeats, and the first piece of a future falls into place.


End file.
